Concentration Can Be Tough During Quarantine, Refresh Your Strategies
Get rid of the hurdles
When I worked as a consultant I developed the habit of working in flights. It was a practical way to get some work done and have some free time to spend with my girlfriend and friends when I landed (yes, free time is kinda scarce in consulting). While working in a 3-hour flight, I realized I could complete large chunks of work, and honestly much more than I would have done perhaps the whole day in the office. Surprising! Why on earth was I able to be more productive in a clearly less comfortable work environment? It turns out that the key is concentration.
Deep Work by Cal Newport is the best book I read in 2019, because it helped me understand how concentration works and gave me practical examples on how I can do more in less time. And while concentration is key, it’s not enough. There were three more books that showed me how I can reach my highest productivity levels ever. Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman taught me how to be a more nuanced system 2 thinker — more on this later in this post. Scrum by Jeff Sutherland helped me understand how to structure a team’s cooperation and maximize team productivity. And finally, Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker was the push-back I needed to value work-life balance more; you can reach your highest productivity potential only if you sleep 8 hours a day — non negotiable! Let’s dive deeper into each element!
Ninja mode is better than caffeine
I start this section with all the apps that send me notifications while I’m working:
- Slack (three workspaces)
- Gmail (only one account)
- Outlook (two accounts)
- Messenger
- Viber (for some reason my family in Greece still uses this)
- Notion (when I get new mentions)
This is definitely an incomplete list, and I guess it sounds familiar. Even though I have not done an actual experiment, I probably get >1 notification per minute. It’s literally impossible to do deep work (think 100% concentrated) when your mind is distracted. Even for the emails/slacks you don’t open, you are just distracted when you see the notification. We are running 110 meter hurdles (world record: 12.8" by Aries Merritt) when we could run 100 meter sprints (world record: 9.58" by Usain Bolt). Here are some practical ways to embrace deep work and have some ninja time:
- Block time for deep work in your calendar
- Invest in noise cancelling headphones and/or find playlists that help you concentrate
- BLOCK ALL NOTIFICATIONS. Put your phone on silent, and close all the apps in your laptop. Connectivity is a friend and an enemy at the same time.
- Find a room or desk with few distractions. I like to keep it tidy and clean
Scrum is like adding Steve Nash to your team
While it’s very useful to have talented players in a team, it’s extremely important to help them find chemistry and collaborate with each other. Two key elements in successful offense in basketball are a charismatic, visionary point-guard and effective spacing. Surprisingly, these two elements are also useful in business. And Scrum can help you achieve them. A Scrum master helps a team self-organize and make changes fast — in a similar way that Steve Nash enabled his teammates when he led the offense. Scrum also helps team members know what everybody in the team is working on. If someone is already working on a financial model (or is setting up a pick-n-roll), then it’s not the best use of my time to do the same. Or if there’s an important task that someone can handle more effectively than I can (or when there is a “miss-match”), maybe it’s better if they take it over and I work on something else.
One of the key elements of Scrum, daily meetings, is a very powerful habit that agile teams use to maximize communication and efficiency among teams. In daily meetings each team member shares what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today and what blocks their way to success, usually within 15'. Some see this as a micro-management tactic for people to control daily tasks. I disagree. Effective dailies are a unique way to maximize efficiency and collaboration in teams, as well as solving problems on the go.
Tip: don’t expect to do the perfect daily meeting the first time you run it. You might need up to a month to ensure a seamless and effective daily, but I promise it will make your team’s life so much easier.
Do we really need a meeting? REALLY?
Unfortunately, meetings are free, so people tend to overuse them. Here are some thoughts you can use in your organization to save time in meetings:
- Each time before you set up a meeting ask yourself: can I resolve this with an email? If no, why?
- Only invite people who can really contribute to the discussion. If it’s just an FYI invitation, let them know it’s optional and there’s an alternative to just update them after the meeting
- If you only need people for 10 minutes, don’t have them stay for 1 hour — invite them to join the first or last 10 minutes of the meeting (or hold another 10 minute meeting)
- Set up a culture in your organization to only send out meetings with pre-filled agendas. If you want people to read or prepare something before the meeting, make it very clear in the meeting invite and let them know how much time this will take
Push yourself to do more system 2 thinking
Most times of your workday are spent in mechanical, almost automatic tasks — which D. Kahneman describes as system 1 thinking. The way you read and reply to most emails, the work you put in to build a new spreadsheet, the time spent in a meeting. However, most value-adding activities come from system 2 thinking. The way I interpret system 2 thinking is this: a scholastic, analytical thinking of a problem that leads to a concrete solution based on a non-obvious insight. Here are some examples of system 2 thinking:
- Reading an investment memo that has a recommendation to invest in a startup and replying to it with arguments on why you disagree
- Coming up with a structure to construct a spreadsheet (eg what columns are needed) to enable faster data entry and a simpler way to call data from the database in the future
- Listening carefully to a presentation and asking questions that will help you reach a final conclusion in a meeting
Else put, system 2 thinking is all the difficult work we like to skip. It’s easy to read an email and reply “ok” (and sometimes it’s the right thing to do), but it’s much more difficult to reply “Well, thanks for the recommendation, but I disagree because x, y, z”. Coming up with the x, y and z requires system 2 thinking and is what adds value to organizations. Push yourself more to come up with opinions that challenge others’ ideas, structures that simplify tasks (now and in the future) and ways to accelerate decision making in your organization.
Sleep 8 (non-negotiable) hours a day
I love sleeping, and it’s weird because I rarely recall what happened while I was sleeping. But I know what happens when I don’t sleep well: I’m grumpy, incapable of concentrating and definitely less sharp. My best friends make fun of me on how religiously I try to get 8 hours of sleep per day (even when I worked as a consultant), and they bragged on how they can thrive when sleeping 5 hours a day. Friends, I’m sorry, but Matthew Walker explains Why we sleep. And thankfully, he does it in a very convincing manner that will at least trigger your thoughts around sleeping. Fifty years ago people thought it was ok to smoke cigarettes. My prediction is that sleeping habits will change drastically in the next decades and people (and organizations) will become increasingly aware of the benefits of sleeping 8 hours a day.
Conclusion: You can get rid of your hurdles
Productivity should be among the top priorities for professionals. If you’re an employee, higher productivity will lead to higher earnings and more free time. If you’re an entrepreneur, it will help you outperform competition and improve employee retention. Push yourself to get out of your comfort zone and enhance your productivity, it will literally change your life!
